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Perl 6 Design Minutes for 07 May 2008

brian_d_foy on 2008-05-09T08:36:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 07 May 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

  • spent my time this week slicing and dicing the exceptions implementation
  • replaced the old internals with the new system
  • checked that in yesterday
  • still a few failing tests in edge cases on the branch
  • did more work on the Parrot Foundation

c:

  • I own an acre of Mars, we could incorporate there

Allison:

  • don't you own a cow in the Philippines?

c:

  • yes, but that doesn't give me any governmental powers

Patrick:

  • isn't that worth a lot?

c:

  • the peso is improving against the dollar

Jesse:

  • moving on...

Larry:

  • clear bill of health from my medical reports
  • hacking a lot against the standard grammar in my STD5 implementation
  • lots of refactoring
  • all of the various parameters that used to go through separately now go through as part of the Match object
  • including the "fate" and whether we're peeking at the longest token set
  • the longest token matcher works now
  • I threw out my old mechanism for gathering Match objects
  • it now creates the more-or-less correctly
  • lots of grammar tweaks, as suggested by Mitchell Charity
  • lots of refactoring of how logging works so that it doesn't always spew enormous quantities of information to the screen
  • I can actually run the parser quite quickly now, for some definition of quickly that approximates 2000 characters per second
  • matches symbols directly, rather than calling a rule, which is faster
  • does the backoff now on longest token matching
  • started refactoring the grammar on the assumption that I cna trust the longest token matcher
  • no longer any nofat rule
  • the longest token should match the fat arrow, if there is one
  • started refactoring the quoting rules to parse as if they were sublanguages
  • getting rid of extra rigamarole to recreate the other mechanism we already use for other languages
  • working out the linkage for switching in and out of sublanguages
  • how to get to the outer language from the inner language
  • calling into pure Perl from closures in a regex
  • or the host language if you're calling the regex from another language
  • nailed down the available methods for Match objects in the specs
  • giving a talk in Seattle on Friday at SPU
  • flying to Japan on Saturday

Patrick:

  • spent a lot of time teaching this past week
  • cleared up now
  • mostly I've answered questions on mailing lists and IRC
  • I'm not always sure that I'm helpful, but I'm there
  • yesterday I worked on trying to get a bunch of little small things here and there
  • fixed up a few things in PCT internals
  • today I'm bringing PGE up to date with some of the latest changes in S05
  • these all help Rakudo and other languages in small ways
  • trying to clean out my backlog and clean up a bunch of RT tickets
  • I'll continue over the next couple of days
  • and blogging about it as I go

Jerry:

  • things are busy, mostly non-Parrot related stuff
  • submitted a ticket that I hope Patrick can close today

Patrick:

  • many languages depend on the old behavior, including Plumhead
  • I'm not certain about some of them

Jerry:

  • mostly otherwise answering questions on #parrot
  • making sure that things are set up for the real work phase of GSoC
  • making sure that students have their CLAs, if not commit bits
  • astonished to see how much work Jonathan is getting done in just two funded days
  • it's amazing to see how much a motivator money can be
  • I'd like to see more of it, hint hint

c:

  • working on closing as many open Parrot bugs as possible
  • applying as many open patches as possible
  • should be able to help on the concurrency branch soon
  • otherwise preparing for the release
  • going to check on received CLAs this week

Nicholas:

  • found it curious that Perl 5.10 has the best state implementation of any language
  • wanted to steal tests from another implementation
  • had a discussion with Leon about SMOP
  • there's no real description of how all of these implementations fit together
  • Rakudo plus Parrot is a complete implementation
  • SMOP and kp6 fit together nicely

Jesse:

  • I started a wiki page on the Perl 6 wiki at Perl_6_Implementations

Patrick:

  • I don't know that it says how things fit together

Jesse:

  • I tried to encourage other people to contribute stuff
  • didn't get much uptake

Nicholas:

  • should we suggest to Daniel that he should help explain things?

Jesse:

  • that's more likely to get people contributing to it

Will:

  • there's definitely some confusion about it within the Grants Committee

Jerry:

  • SMOP has the highest documentation-to-line-of-code ratio of any implementation

Patrick:

  • it needs a good overview though

Nicholas:

  • I'll ask Daniel to explain more
  • especially its relationship to Parrot and Rakudo

Jerry:

  • it sounds like it could be an alternate runcore for Perl 5 as well

Jesse:

  • tried a few different things
  • decided to write a test for Rakudo
  • tried a simple arithmetic test pulled from Pugs
  • found that Rakudo didn't implement a function specified in the S29 draft
  • Patrick helped me write a couple of lines of code to implement it
  • then discovered that fudge didn't support try blocks in a specific way
  • Larry patched that
  • then found that incrementing an undefined value didn't work in Rakudo
  • that was the end of my day
  • I still need to write up my findings
  • how easy is it for someone without experience in Rakudo and its internals to pick things up and contribute something?
  • more difficult than I thought it might be, but it's getting more doable
  • it's important to understand how it might fail before trying to get people to do it
  • then I started trying to play with MAD on the weekend
  • found and fixed a bug in its XML
  • refactored it such that you can run MAD's tests in the core if you add a copy of XML::Parser to the core
  • it's not far enough yet, but it's a start

Nicholas:

  • is it going to be difficult to restructure the Parrot foundation from 501(c)(3) to 501(c)(6)?

Allison:

  • you can do pretty much the same thing
  • sponsors are on the board in a c6
  • they're only advisory in a c3
  • the sponsors we've talked to are mostly only interested in getting regular status reports and the like

Jesse:

  • is there any jumping around to transfer copyright to the new foundation?

Allison:

  • we'll do a copyright assignment from the Perl Foundation to the Parrot Foundation
  • all of the CLAs that went into the code up to the point of signover will be fine
  • but we'll essentially copy the Perl Foundation CLA to a Parrot Foundation CLA

Will:

  • do we need to contact committers who haven't signed a CLA?

Patrick:

  • where does Rakudo fall?

Allison:

  • still under the Perl Foundation
  • it doesn't move at all

Will:

  • do we want to split up the repository at that point?

Allison:

  • eventually, we'll want to do so anyway
  • it's not an urgent thing

Jerry:

  • what would it take to version a Perl6Regex frontend to PGE?
  • let grammars specify a version of the grammar

Patrick:

  • I did that before by having a separate compiler
  • you're talking about something a bit finer grained
  • I don't want to do that
  • as we get closer to 1.0, that'd be fine
  • I already have enough to do keeping up with the latest versions

Will:

  • I don't think we want to keep up old versions

Patrick:

  • I don't mind sticking to our deprecation cycle
  • I hadn't put the change from today into the deprecation list yet
  • we'll get to it in a couple of weeks

Jerry:

  • just trying to figure out how to push forward with changes to PGE without having to update every language in the repository

Patrick:

  • freeze S05?
  • not a great solution

Larry:

  • I heard that

Patrick:

  • the last few changes have been great
  • I'm not really serious about that

Larry:

  • some of them you even asked for

c:

  • it's an advantage to have these languages in the repository
  • we can update them
  • but only if we can run the tests before and after and know that they pass

Will:

  • we might consider removing languages with failing tests and no recent updates
  • there are 17 grant proposals, some of them Perl 6-related
  • please comment on the TPF blog
  • it'll help

Jesse:

  • blog.perlfoundation.org

SMOP

nicholas on 2008-05-09T21:18:15

Nicholas:

  • I'll ask Daniel to explain more
  • especially its relationship to Parrot and Rakudo

I did this. Foolish mortal that I am, I also volunteered to update the wiki with Daniel's e-mail explanation, so it now has a longer introduction to SMOP.